Plain Talk Rising: poems

Mark Dows Plain Talk Rising opens when a boy opens his eyes to his mothers already-inescapable presence. It ends with the possibility of endlessness when the mother touches her own pregnant belly and for the first time he knows she knows he is there.David Rosenberg (author of A Literary Bible and co-author with Harold Bloom of The Book of J) writes that Plain Talk Rising transmutes poetry into prose and then back again like an alchemist let loose in a writing workshop that may set alight our era of MFAs for good.The New Haven Review says that Plain Talk Rising is able to make us feel our lived-in time and a kind of eternal time. . . . Dows brilliant wordplay is equal to the stringent -- and playful -- task he sets himself. Sentences stanzas lines words and even individual letters are forms which make a man feel trapped and free. Syntax touches and delineates objects ideas and emotions evenly. Whats most invisibles the main thing after all.Does everyone fight something without form / something formless I mean something parsed / to powder mistaken for nothing while meanwhile / slipped above the radar and re-forming itself on / a wider perimeter formlessness notwithstanding / or is that just me? Before being self-published Plain Talk Rising was a finalist in the Colorado Prize New Issues and Yale Series competitions. It was a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press. The poems in Plain Talk Rising were written between the mid-1980s and early 2000s. about the book on the Agni blog (Dick Talk Sept. 3 2018).Dows poems and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of print and online journals including Alaska Quarterly Review Chicago Review Conjunctions Drunken Boat Fascicle Los Angeles Times New York Times Paris Review Pequod PN Review SLAM! Wrestling Threepenny Review and 3: AM Magazine. A graduate of Yale University and the University of California at Irvine Dow is also the author of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (California 2004).***[Erratum: Some copies of Plain Talk Rising may require the following correction: on p. 14 the penultimate line of the second stanza should read: . . . To remember and forget are not two opposite acts here.] Read more